My brain is a cool little cluster, my brain!

Okay, I figured it out. Isabel, a customizer of 1:6 scale dolls, needs a mess work table filled with tools and creative projects. Scissors, wire snips, wire pincers, coils of wire, sandpaper, craft knife, craft saw, rotary tool, paint brushes, paint tubes, paint palette, paint stirrers, cup for rinsing brushes, glue gun, glue sticks, colored pencils -- all of these are really easy to make from scratch.

She also needs, of course, dolls, in both finished and unpainted states. For finished background dolls, "G scale unpainted figures" on Ebay brings up a bulk lot of 28 plastic standing/sitting peoples who can easily be painted and parked on shelves. Now that I think about it, some of these peoples could also be strategically dismembered to generate heads, hands, clothes and shoes for parts bins.

For foreground dolls, i.e., those projects that serve as plot points, I would use some of the items previously discussed under the "dolls for dolls" tag: head sets and hand sets from Hornet Miniatures. There may be a generic or two from Bronze Age Miniatures for the inevitable naked doll[s] lying around, but one of those costs almost as much as a pack of 28 unpainted plastic peoples, so I'm not sure... Maybe the unpainted plastic peoples could be altered to be naked...

EDIT: thestylehome on Ebay has incredibly cheap lots of painted/unpainted plastic peoples!

Lazy bookcase finished

I finished shelving books on my 1:6 scale bookcase made from a repurposed drawer organizer. A shipment of premade dummies in two sizes arrived today from Factory Direct Crafts, so I spent from about 1:30  to 9:00 PM [with a break for an appointment, a brief trip to the grocery store and dinner] completing the project.

I'm not the sort of person who feels the need to scan actual books and print out their covers in 1:6 scale for a library appropriate to each character. However, I was dissatisfied with the plain, undifferentiated spines in the earlier iteration of the bookcase. I spent most of those hours creating unique dummies with the help of solid origami paper, patterened origami paper and gift tag stickers with vaguely Xmas- and winter-related patterns.

I also endeavored to arrange them in an aesthetically pleasing fashion, representing a variety of heights and colors, as real bookshelves do. Then I glued them into blocks of several books, but these blocks are not glued to the shelves. Instead they are kept in there by the fact that everything is wedged so tightly. I'm sure there's a technical term for that, but it escapes me at the moment.

Anyway, behold the bookcase! Though it's currently displaying Peter's interest [flora], this bookcase, like pretty much in my collection of 1:6 scale set pieces, will be used wherever a full, well-used library is needed. In fact, the shelves with the flowers and lava lamp I have intentionally left open so that their contents can reflect the bookcase's current owner: cacti for Peter [have to make some of those], 1:6 scale figures for Ellery or Isabel, zombie dolls for Theophany, mementos mori for Lucian, etc.

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